“I am a climate change lukewarmer”, asserts Matt Ridley, an award-winning journalist and best-selling author of “The Rational Optimist”. Writing for The Times, Matt defends his position by explaining that whilst he believes recent global warming is real, mostly man-made and will continue, he also thinks that it is not likely to be dangerous, and its slow and erratic progress so far is what we should expect in the future.

Despite being subject to “torrents of online abuse” for his stance, Matt maintains that his current view is still consistent with the “consensus” among scientists, as represented by the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): that climate change is happening, not that it is going to be dangerous. However, he notes that policies being proposed to combat climate change – far from being a modest insurance policy – “are proving ineffective, expensive, harmful to poor people and actually bad for the environment.”

Matt contends that the polarisation of the climate debate has gone too far, adding that “all the fury must mean that my arguments are hitting home, or efforts would be made to demolish them rather me.” He goes on to give examples of critics “playing the man and not the ball”, and demonstrates that his point of view seems to particularly displease publicly funded scientists and politicians, who insist that climate change is still a big risk.